juxtaposing signs

Core Samples 09 — Think back over works you have done over your lifetime. Add any strong impulses, things you always “wanted to do.” In considering the works that were unconcluded, what potential still exists in each? Chose an idea from your responses that still has some life in it. Let a piece come from reviving that idea.

Photography is the medium I use to capture what I experience. Space and place serve as my content to document what I see, and re-represent it. I am studying space and time as data to study multiplicity and multidimensionality. This semester I have worked on numerous short studies in trying to define these space/place inspirations. I have constructed several small books which utilize my photographs from the southwest. Signs, building materials, horizon landscapes—they all have influenced me.
These moments—random instances filtered through my interests and my perception— depend on what I happened to see. They now make up my subject matter. I gather information and frame it in new forms. I don’t set out with too specific goals. Yet, the photographs which I capture resonate with similarities.

Close up fragments decontextualized from their original surroundings—these isolated, blown up instances convey and capture the sense of place. As a hunter and gatherer, I do not seek out specific inspiration; I utilize materials which I come across, documenting and transcribing my journeys. The particular place is also almost incidental, as inspiration and source material can come out of anything. From Route 66, I photographed signs and billboards, graphic buildings in the flat landscape.

I like mixing and rearranging, constructing and intersecting. In my project I wanted to work with free association—pairing two things that did not necessarily go together. In this week’s studies, I overlapped letterpress letters on top of printouts of signs from the southwest. I began looking at signs as content, signs that took the place of buildings. The vernacular vocabulary of old Route 66 hotel signs proved to be inspirational. With their colors, overlaps, and woodcut forms the old signs acted as letter forms and as symbols of language. I got interested in the layering of the letterpress on top of the printed photographs to reveal and conceal the information underneath.

materials 02

materials

Core Samples 08 — What materials do you collect, salvage, save for use on something? Make a list of your favorite materials. What are the materials that you don’t know how to approach or use but find yourself curious about?

This week our assignment was to pick a material and create a project experimenting with the material and its opposite. I became intrigued in working with wax, which was an amazing material that transformed its state. I melted it and then dried it back into a solid. From frozen state I was able to quickly reconfigure it into a liquid, changeable state. Solid turned into liquid turned into solid again—the reaction continued endlessly. This transformation from liquid to solid, as well as the ability to embed objects inside of the material made beeswax as well as candle wax attractive materials for experiment. The wax became a canvas for material collages of various forms.

I had used wax once before, but never fully explored its potential as a material which could create collages with embedded materials. I poured the wax into small “pages” which were meant to be put together into a book work. The books became tactile and sensory experiences. The differently colored and differently combined flat pages constructed three book works with different materials and themes. The exploration evolved into a very hands-on experimental process where I kept adding different found materials into the wax to see what kind of relationships could result within the frozen collages.

I like wax. I like how it embeds things, layers things in space, it is away of doing physical college. It is an alluring medium, but I don’t see the content for the medium yet. It is very physical, more physical than anything else. It is breakable. It is a medium that is not solid, that is not permanent. I think a lot of its appeal lies in that fragile state. Hammett and Chris Bertoni suggested reinterpreting the medium and putting it down again. So, taking a photograph of it, so that it is no longer wax, but illuminated wax on a digital photograph. This would be one iterative aspect of how to use the wax.

One of the other students said, “Wow, you can make a book out of anything” I have done a lot of books out of very different materials. It can be a hindrance if I keep rushing around, trying new things. Whether it is a cyanotype or wax, book prints or the letterpress, I have a very additive approach to design, and at times it gets to be too overwhelming.

journeys

Core Samples 04 — Think back to the journeys you have made. Consider any kind of journey, defined simply as moving from one place to another. Select what seems important and examine the sequence of events which comprise it.

As the southwest trip was so inspiring for me, I made a second project where I painted the skies. I visited numerous galleries during this trip and was mostly drawn to paintings which were abstract color studies of the southwest skies. I decided to paint skyscapes, which show the changing time of day and became journeys of time. If I captured the essence of the road trip itself, then I captured the essence of a journey.